The Last Patrician (8 page)

Bobby's Stimsonianism was not limited to English suits and garden parties (yes, Bobby
did
wear English suits).
15
It was more than a matter of skiing in Sun Valley and dining at Le Pavillon (his favorite New York restaurant).
16
It went beyond honoring the English tradition of the long weekend at the country house. (Bobby's staff, although they loved their master, resented his “habit of taking off on a Thursday for a long weekend of fun and games, leaving them with lengthy assignments” to be completed before his return to the office on Monday morning.)
17
The patrician ethos had penetrated to the core of his consciousness. He was, in his relations with those whose circumstances were less splendid than his own, a model of sympathy, of generosity, of kindness—although one is forced to note Richard Nixon's assertion that when Bobby disliked his food, he was in the habit of throwing it on the floor.
18
Angie Novello, his secretary, was devoted to him. Able lieutenants, men like Pierre Salinger, Burke Marshall, John Seigenthaler, and Ed Guthman, loved him. And yet—it is impossible to deny it—there was an element of condescension in his dealings with social inferiors. Jimmy Hoffa did not fail to perceive it. “I can tell by how he shakes hands what kind of fellow I got,” Hoffa said. When, in 1957, Bobby was investigating the Teamsters, the two men dined together at the house of Eddie Cheyfitz, an associate of the criminal defense lawyer Edward Bennett Williams. The encounter was not a success; Hoffa thought Bobby patronizing, a “damn spoiled jerk.” “Here's a fella,” Hoffa said, who “thinks he's doing me a favor by talking to me.”
19
Bobby's condescending questions about the nature of union leadership offended Hoffa. “It was as though he was asking, with my limited education, what right did I have to run a union like this?”
20

Bobby once said that for members of the American middle class life was reasonably comfortable. Perhaps; but how did
he
know? Nelson Rockefeller's ignorance of the New York subways is celebrated (Rocky thought each car had its own toilet; hi ya, fella).
21
On the single occasion on which Winston Churchill reportedly ventured into the London Underground he “got on the Circle Line and went helplessly round and round on it until, several hours later, a friend rescued him from the ordeal.”
22
Bobby's own ignorance of this elementary aspect of modern urban life was no less mind-boggling. On his first encounter with the New York subway, in the 1960s, he slammed into the turnstile, receiving “a jolt that caused him to double up” in pain.
23
“You can really lose your life that way,” he said in a startled tone as an aide deposited a token for him. The gulf that separated him from the hopelessly non-U of the world, from those who composed what Vita Sackville-West called the “bedint” classes, was nowhere more evident than in his relations with J. Edgar Hoover.
24
Bobby is said to have wanted good relations with the FBI director, but in his attempts to establish them, he failed miserably, in part because Hoover resented his breezy patrician nonchalance.
25
Bobby made no effort to restrain himself in Hoover's presence; he might have been back in his Milton dorm, chewing the fat with Dave Hackett. Hoover was, in spite of the unconventional arrangements of his domestic life, the incarnation of the pieties and prejudices of middle America, and he was appalled by Bobby's behavior. During one of their conferences Bobby “idly tossed darts at a board on the wall.”
26
Hoover, angered by this insouciance, “became even more upset when Kennedy missed the board, and the dart lodged in the paneling.” “It was pure desecration,” Hoover said. “Desecration of government property.” It “was the most deplorably undignified conduct” he had “ever witnessed on the part of a Cabinet member.”
27
Hoover was undoubtedly an unpleasant character, a bureaucratic tyrant, one who had carved out of the vast territory of the national security state his own little fiefdom. The fact remains, however, that Bobby and his brother had determined to keep him on as director, and having done so, they were bound to treat him with the civility due a man who had first entered the Justice Department eight years before Bobby himself was born. And yet Bobby seemed almost to enjoy subjecting the old man to the petty humiliations of office hierarchy. Contrary to all departmental precedent, Bobby would summon Hoover to his office by means of a buzzer.
28
Others were startled. “Nobody ever buzzed Hoover,” Walter Sheridan, a former FBI agent and the head of the “Get-Hoffa Squad” in Bobby's Justice Department, said.
29
But “within sixty seconds” of Bobby's having pressed the buzzer, the old man came in “with a red face,” though “it griped him very much” to do so.
30

However careless Bobby was of other people's dignity, he insisted on his own and was zealous of the least punctilio of his family's honor. The director of the FBI could be ordered about like a common lackey; members of the Kennedy family were to be treated in a way that accorded with their rank and dignity in life. High government officials, whom Bobby received while sitting with his feet up on his desk chewing gum, could be chastised like schoolboys; the Kennedys themselves were to be treated with becoming deference.
31
When Jack's friend Paul “Redhead” Fay sought to publish a memoir of the late President, Bobby was angered by Fay's failure to adhere rigidly to the canons of diplomatic etiquette. “Mr. Kennedy,” Bobby noted on a draft of the book submitted for his review, “should not be called ‘Joe' [or] ‘Big Joe,' but ‘Ambassador' or ‘Mr. Kennedy.'”
32
This lordly arrogance was not only startling, it was also easily provoked, as a hapless equestrian judge discovered during a contretemps involving Bobby's dog, Brumus, at a Virginia horse show. LaDonna Harris, the wife of Bobby's friend Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma, recalled how Brumus,

the lumbering ox, went out and sat right in the middle of the show! He was just sitting there! The ringmaster—or whatever his title is—said, “Would somebody kindly get their dog out of here? The dog is disturbing the horses. Would you get the dog…?” And he nudged the dog with his foot. The Senator leaned over the rail and said, “Don't kick my dog.” The ringmaster … well, it kind of took him aback. He said, “Senator, I didn't kick…” The Senator said, “I saw you! Don't ever kick my dog again.”
33

Bobby's insistence on the dignity and prerogatives of “the family” and all those connected to it seemed to England's
Sunday Telegraph
closer to the spirit of the eighteenth-century Whig aristocracy than the democratic spirit of twentieth-century America.
34
And why ever not? The Kennedys had, after all, married into one of the greatest Whig families in England. Rose Kennedy might have abhorred the prospect of her daughter Kathleen being taken to wife by Billy Hartington, the eldest son of the Duke of Devonshire, in a marriage performed outside of the Church, but Joseph Kennedy must secretly have been delighted by the idea of a union between the Kennedys and the Cavendishes. No matter that the splendor of the Devonshires' fortune derived largely from the first earl's traffic in abbey lands, in the despoiled property of the monasteries, in the sacred chattels of the Church: everybody loves a lord, and the Stimsonians loved them better than most. A man who hoped to see his children grow up to be Stimsonians could only have rejoiced to see his family contract an alliance that even the proudest patricians must have approved and even envied. Just as he wanted Jacqueline Bouvier for a daughter-in-law because she had more “class” than any of Jack's other girlfriends, so also must he have gloried in the idea of being the father-in-law of a genuine Whig aristocrat, one whose “class” made even Roosevelts and Astors look somehow shabby in comparison. Like his father, Bobby never forgot the family's aristocratic connection. When, in July 1951, his first child was born, he and his wife named the baby Kathleen Hartington.

5

Stimsonians were not brought up, they were not trained, they were not equipped, to regard their fellowmen as equals; Bobby was as little capable as FDR or Nelson Rockefeller or Averell Harriman of viewing the “little people” of the world as anything other than weak, helpless, and in need of patrician protection. The little people could not protect themselves; only statesmen possessed of an aristocratic sense of honor and noblesse oblige could be relied upon to treat them fairly. Noblesse oblige must not, however, be mistaken for a pure and unselfish form of charity; like Thackeray's Miss Crawley, who, although she professes to love equality, makes her “equal” Becky Sharp “run her errands, execute her millinery, and read her to sleep with French novels,” the Stimsonians, too, professed to love equality, but at the same time expected their social inferiors to defer to them in questions of government.
1
FDR's own ambivalent attitude toward the lower orders—his ability to sympathize with them and at the same time be made acutely uncomfortable by them—was perfectly captured by his wife when she observed that “Franklin is not at ease with people not of his own class.”
2
Roosevelt ruled over the nation's “forgotten” men, but he was not obliged to dine with them, or take tea with them at Hyde Park.

Although Bobby had been brought up to regard this Stimsonian paternalism as part of the natural order of things, it represented a radical departure from the aspirations of the past. In the vision of Emerson and Lincoln, the common man, shrewd and self-reliant, was a heroic figure, endowed with more promise and potential than those Old World characters who were laden with the baggage of the past. It is the democratic Hawk-eye, not the aristocratic Major Heyward, who knows how to protect himself and his friends in Fenimore Cooper's tale. Lincoln similarly celebrated the promise of “the prudent, penniless beginner in the world” who in time becomes a capitalist himself:

A young man finds himself of an age to be dismissed from parental control; he has for his capital nothing save two strong hands that God has given him, a heart willing to labor, and a freedom to choose the mode of his work and the manner of his employer … he avails himself of the opportunity of hiring himself to some man who has capital to pay him a fair day's wages for a fair day's work.… He works industriously, behaves soberly, and the result of a year or two's labor is a surplus capital. Now he buys land on his own hook; he settles, marries, begets sons and daughters, and in the course of time has enough capital to hire some new beginner.
3

The Stimsonians stood Cooper and Lincoln on their heads; the common man became, in the Stimsonian vision, an utterly unheroic soul, one who was forced to look to a gentle patrician knight—an elegant Major Heyward, a smiling FDR—for protection against the evils of a marketplace he lacked the strength to master himself. For all its notions of progress and possibility, the American liberalism that grew out of the Stimsonian philosophy was a curiously regressive phenomenon: though it ostensibly celebrated the Forgotten Man, it in fact trivialized and diminished him. Where compassion had once consisted of giving a man the tools and the opportunity, as well as the self-confidence, to forge his own destiny, it now consisted of making him more comfortable in his mediocrity. For a time Bobby shared this way of thinking; he aspired to be what Schlesinger called a “tribune of the underclass,” a defender of those who were unable to defend themselves.

Franklin Roosevelt perfected the technique of enveloping the lower classes in a warm rhetorical bath of patrician solicitude. The embodiment of twentieth-century paternalistic aristocracy, the second Roosevelt raised noblesse oblige to the level of high political art. Cousin Teddy's career was but a foreshadowing, a prefiguration, of the master's.
*
FDR has a better claim than either Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson to the title of founder of the twentieth-century regulatory and administrative state; it was FDR who, more than anyone else, succeeded in replacing the nineteenth-century tradition of liberal individualism with his own brand of welfare state liberalism. Scholars have for the most part failed to understand just how radical this break with the past was, and have tended to portray Roosevelt as a pragmatic improviser, one who carefully adjusted the machinery of American capitalism in order to preserve it. Richard Hofstadter was perhaps the first serious historian to argue that the New Deal was more than an act of splendid improvisation, that it represented a bold and comprehensive remodeling of the nation's economy and its socioeconomic ideals, a “drastic new departure” that was “different from anything that had yet happened in the United States.”
4
Though Hofstadter had himself, in his earliest study of Roosevelt, depicted the great man as a patrician pragmatist who had largely failed to make the nation over in his own New Deal image, he later revised this estimate of FDR, and concluded that the New Deal represented one of the great sea changes in American history.
5
True, much of the early New Deal legislation was patently amateurish, and the Supreme Court made short work of the worst of it, striking down, for example, the system of little industrial communes envisioned by the National Industrial Recovery Act.
6
Later legislation—the Social Security Act, the Wagner Act, the punitive wealth tax—was better drafted and more far-reaching in its effects. The welfare state was born; henceforth, Hofstadter wrote, the federal government would “take responsibility on a large scale for social security, unemployment insurance, wages and hours, and housing.”
7
Still more imposing, Hofstadter noted, was the “new fiscal role of the federal government” contemplated by the New Deal. By the end of the thirties, Roosevelt had fully embraced Lord Keynes's belief that a large and activist government could ameliorate the fluctuations of the business cycle, and it was during Roosevelt's presidency that the federal government became what it remains to this day—the force that “more than anything else determines the course of the economy” and the direction of national life.
8